


The Mystery of Medic’s Missing Mannpoo

by Innwich



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Fluff and Crack, Happy April Fools' Day, Humor, Investigations, M/M, Showers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-01
Updated: 2016-04-01
Packaged: 2018-05-30 13:52:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,970
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6426439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Innwich/pseuds/Innwich
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Medic lost his shampoo, and set his mind on tracking down the thief that had stolen it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mystery of Medic’s Missing Mannpoo

**Author's Note:**

> Hover over the words in italics for translations.

Medic wasn’t the most careful man in the base.

Just last week, he had showered four times in a day because he’d kept forgetting he’d washed himself already. He’d been on his way to take a fifth shower when Spy had decloaked behind him and informed him of his errors. In turn, Medic had informed Spy that it’d been creepy of Spy to keep track of who had come in and out of the shower room.

Spy hadn’t been impressed with his observation, or his fluffy slippers.

Miffed at having his fashion sense criticised, Medic had threatened to not heal Spy on the battlefield the next day. Then Spy had pointed out he hadn’t wanted Medic to heal him during battles anyway because Medic always ruined his disguises when he was infiltrating the enemy team. Like Medic had done that morning. And last week in Lakeside. And last month in Thunder Mountain. And the month before that in Upward.

Deciding that he’d heard enough and that he would like to go back to his room, Medic had had the brilliant idea to shut Spy up by spychecking him.

But Spy had dodged his punches and his knee and pulled his shower cap down over his glasses to blind him. Then Spy had called him a rude name and told him he sucked.

But Medic digressed.

He wasn’t a careful man. He simply wasn’t good at keeping tracks of things.

He had packs of rubber gloves stuffed under his bed since he lost his gloves faster than he lost his socks, which happened without fail on every laundry day. His employer hadn’t been happy to know that his mortality rate on the battlefield had gone down because the enemy team hadn’t been able to spot him as easily as when he’d been wearing his team-coloured gloves. It hadn’t been his fault; his gloves had had an unfortunate tendency to disappear when he’d least expected them to. But the Administration department had sent him a strongly worded letter to remind him that failure to comply with the dress code would result in the termination of his employment.

Which was why Medic had made an effort to keep a list of his personal inventory, and why Medic had noticed an anomaly with his shampoo.

His shampoo was being emptied faster than he’d been using them.

He’d gone through two bottles of shampoo in one month. He would have to ask Engineer to buy him a new bottle of Mann’s Mannpoo from the gas station again when Engineer went into town on his weekly supply run. It couldn’t be because he’d taken more showers than he’d remembered taking; he was still only half-way through his shower gel.

No. The only explanation was that someone had been siphoning away his shampoo and left his shaving cream and cologne untouched. In an attempt to catch the culprit red-handed, he had made random but frequent trips to his washroom to make sure that his bottle of shampoo was in the cabinet where he’d left it. What had baffled him was that his shampoo had never left the cabinet, but every night his shampoo weighed a little lighter in his hand than the night before.

The matter had him up at odd hours of the night to perform checks in his washroom. It gave him more headaches than the one dollar that the bottle of shampoo was worth. But it was the principle of things; he refused to let the culprit get away with taking advantage of his absent-mindedness and general lack of attention to details.

Time had now come for him to step up his game.

Medic switched on the lights in his infirmary. There was no sign of disturbances. Everything looked the same as they’d done during the two random checks he’d done earlier that evening. The infirmary was quiet now that his birds had been locked away in his bedroom for the night. The operating table was stained with Scout’s blood from yesterday’s experiment and his biohazard waste bin was starting to smell. He wouldn’t be surprised if he had a nice batch of maggots by the end of the week. Medic knelt down to inspect the hinges of his washroom door.

“Ah, yes,” he said to himself.

The slip of paper that he’d balanced on the hinges had dropped on the floor. Someone had come into his bathroom uninvited.

Medic pulled open the cabinet behind his mirror. His shampoo was still there, right where he’d left it. But when he turned the bottle around, the tiny cross he’d sketched on the label on its back had gone.

This wasn’t his bottle of shampoo. His thief had removed his shampoo and substituted it for a decoy.

It meant his thief was still holding his shampoo. He still had a chance of catching the thief red-handed.

Medic crawled onto his knees again and pulled out the soaked mat under the sink. It was marked by a faint depression that Medic wouldn’t notice if he wasn’t looking for it. But he was looking for it, because he was expecting it. His trap was being sprung as he had planned.

“It’s only a matter of time before I find you,” Medic said giddily.

The mat had been soaked in a liquid that Medic had created by accident when he’d been investigating the properties of the secretion of the mutated bread monster that lived in Sniper’s jars. On a whim, Medic had mixed the violently green secretion with the explosive liquid found in the alien landmines scattered around the base back when Teufort had been invaded by extraterrestrial lifeforms, and superheated the mixture in a glass beaker. There had been no scientific reasoning behind his experiment. He’d done it because the two liquids had both been neon green in colour and he was always entertained by unexpected explosions in his lab.

The resulting mixture wasn’t explosive. It wasn’t even corrosive or toxic or harmful in any way to the human body. But it could retain a large amount of heat, and the infrared radiation that it radiated stayed on the surfaces that it had touched long after it’d been wiped off them.

Quickly, Medic went to his lab cupboard and took out his infrared goggles. He called it goggles, but it was actually more of a camera rig that fit over his head. An infrared camera was mounted on a metal headband and connected to a miniature monitor that could be worn on his face like a pair of lab goggles.

The monitor sat heavily on the bridge of Medic’s nose. Like the camera, the monitor was also rigged to the headband to take some of its weight off of his face. The metal parts clanged whenever he moved. It was an unwieldy headgear held together by loose screws and masking tape.

Medic adjusted his glasses behind the grey miniature monitor, and switched on the camera.

Colours showed up on the monitor. The cold washroom was awash in patches of purple and black colourings. The soaked mat was a bright splotch of red in the middle of the monitor. Leading away from the mat, in a vivid orange trail on the purple floor, were footsteps. The footsteps ran in a straight line from the soaked mat to the door of the infirmary, and presumably beyond the door to his bottle of missing shampoo.

“ _Wunderbar_ ,” Medic whispered, reminded once again of the great wonders of science.

That was until he walked into his bathroom door. Then he realised he could see infrared radiation and little else.

  


* * *

  


Medic was regretting that he hadn’t taken his walking stick with him.

He had to keep one hand on the wall so he wouldn’t run into any more corners. But he’d lost his walking stick around the same time he’d accidentally thrown out that petri dish of salamander eyeballs with his medical waste, so it was a rather moot point. Maybe he would ask Engineer to build him a walking stick if he remembered to later.

As far as Medic could tell, he must be somewhere between the recreation room and the intelligence room. The footsteps were glowing less brightly than before. It had turned from orange to mute yellow. What was more, they were no long showing up in the defined shape of the sole of a shoe on his monitor; they were irregular patches of colours that were hard to follow. The trail was going cold, more literally than Medic would like to imagine.

“Doctor. Wait!”

Medic turned around to see a large shape that could only be Heavy lumbering down the hallway towards him. Heavy was a swirl of bright colours in the monotonous dark purple of his surroundings. His head and upper chest burnt bright red in a way that could only be the result of physical exertion.

Medic gingerly lifted up the monitor as Heavy slowed down before him. “ _Ja_?”

“Doctor,” Heavy said. He looked mostly composed, if not for the faint flush on his neck and the sweat on his foregead, though there was no reason why he would be running around the base at night. He rarely ran on the battlefield during the day. “I looked everywhere for you. I have help to ask you of.”

“I’m a little busy, my friend,” Medic said, gesturing at the camera rig on his head. “Can this wait?”

“This will not take long,” Heavy said. There was a rustle of paper, and Heavy held up a crossword puzzle that he’d cut out of today’s newspapers. “It’s for crossword.”

“Very well, if it doesn’t take long,” Medic said. He enjoyed talking with Heavy on a normal night; Heavy was a learned man and a better experimental subject. But Medic was on a time-sensitive mission and he needed to find the thief before the trail disappeared. “What is the clue?”

“Word for ‘study of stars’.”

“I’m sure it is ‘Astronomy’,” Medic said thoughtfully. “Like its German word.”

“Mmm.” Heavy scribbled down the answer with a pencil that was too short in his hand. “It fits in boxes.”

“You’re welcome, _Kamerad_.” Medic turned to leave, but Heavy clamped a big hand over his shoulder.

“I have more words to fill,” Heavy said.

“It’ll have to do this tomorrow,” Medic said. “Will you look at the time?”

“It’s not so late,” Heavy said. “Only eight o’clock.”

“But I have to get ready for bed,” Medic argued. “It is for a, uh, experiment!”

“You’re going to bed?” Heavy said dubiously. “Wearing metal hat?”

“Yes,” Medic said solemnly. “I’m going to bed with this hat. For a sleeping experiment. I won’t be able to do anything else for the night, Heavy. It is necessary for me to start on that experiment now.”

“I see,” Heavy said. The confused crease in his forehead didn’t leave, but he nodded and pocketed his crossword puzzle. “Have good dreams then, doctor.”

“ _Ja_.” Medic lowered the infrared camera monitor over his eyes again once Heavy had left him to his devices. Heavy might be well-versed in the works of literature giants, but he knew next to nothing about science.

As Medic continued on his trek, slowly and surely with the care of a half-blinded man, the trail on the floor was beginning to turn green. It wouldn’t be long before it turned blue and then purple and disappeared altogether. Several feet ahead of Medic, the trail appeared to have split into two. One looped back to the sleeping quarters of the mercenaries, and the other continued down the stairs to the training gym in the basement.

“ _Gottverdammt_ ,” Medic said tiredly. Either his thief had turned into two persons, or Sniper had been walking around the base barefoot again. Like other Australians that Medic had known, Sniper had strange ideas of when it was appropriate to take off his shoes, and Medic had long given up on educating him on European footwear etiquette.

The monitor were bumping into Medic’s glasses uncomfortably and making them pinch the bridge of his nose. The pain was keeping him from thinking straight and deciding which trail to follow. Medic turned off the infrared camera in case he accidentally short-circuited it, disconnecting it from the monitor.

“Hey, doc,” Engineer said.

“Oh, hello. I didn’t see you, Engineer,” Medic said, tugging a screw lose from the metal band around his head. The camera wobbled dangerously. “Actually, I still can’t see you.”

“I ain’t surprised, what with that contraption on your face,” Engineer said. “What are you doing with an infrared camera anyway?”

“It’s for an experiment,” Medic said. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

“Y’know, I wasn’t about to worry until y’all said that,” Engineer said.

“It is nothing,” Medic repeated. Engineer didn’t say anything but Medic could hear the unspoken doubts that Engineer had about his words. Fidgeting, Medic said, “It is nothing! Ach, I’m tired of having my methods questioned!”

“That’s only ‘cause I know you too well, doc,” Engineer said. “You need help with that wire there?”

Engineer tightened the screws on the camera rig so it didn’t put as much weight on Medic’s glasses as it’d done before. Medic thanked Engineer shortly and, eager to leave him and his meddling ways, took the stairs down to the training gym.

The faded trail took Medic past the boxing ring, the treadmills, and the sets of dumbbells near the wall. It was eerily quiet down here. If Medic had switched on the lights, he might have been startled by the faceless training dummies that stood on the racks that held them up, but he followed the glowing trail on the floor and didn’t notice that he was walking in the dark.

The trail ended in the locker room at the other end of the gym. The tiled floor was glowing in yellow; it was warm from the steam seeping into the room from the half-closed door of the communal shower. One of the showers was running.

Medic closed the locker room door silently behind himself.

Why would someone be showering down here at night? Instead of the shower room next to their sleeping quarters?

Medic had little doubts that he was nearing the end of his search for his missing shampoo. Moving as quietly as a snake in the grass, he pushed the monitor up to his forehead, and crept past the lockers and the benches and the dirty hamper that held a pile of bloody shirts in it.

“You took it from doctor?” Heavy’s voice drifted from the shower.

Medic started badly at the call of his title, thinking for sure that he’d been detected by his teammate. He’d been so torn between his fight-or-flight instinct that he nearly missed the next words from the shower.

“But of course. Do you have no faith in me?” Spy said. It would be laughable to describe Spy as coy. Scout had called him a grumpy old dude and Sniper had, on more than occasion, complained that Spy was a smug snob. Medic had eagerly agreed with both of them. Which was why Medic could hardly bring himself to admit that it was smug coyness that he was hearing in Spy’s tone. No one would believe it; he couldn’t believe it himself.

“It is not faith,” Heavy said. “Doctor was acting strange when I went to distract him.”

“It’ll be far stranger if he is acting normal,” Spy said. “I will need more, _mon chéri_. Give me the bottle.”

“For you, _мой Котик_ ,” Heavy murmured, “ _Я отдам тебе мое сердце._ ”

“ _Любимый_ ,” Spy said fondly. “ _Я думаю о тебе постоянно._ ”

The silence in the shower was punctuated by the sound of running water. Medic didn’t dare breathe, let alone move.

There were only so many things that two men could do with a bottle of shampoo in the shower. Medic had no intention to ruin his surprise for his two teammates by acting recklessly now. He would wait for them to squeeze out his shampoo from its bottle, he would wait for them to apply it, and then he would catch them with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar like the naughty children they were. Oo, he could barely wait.

“Aah,” Spy groaned.

“Spy,” Heavy said reproachfully. “You are doing this on purpose; you give show and tease me.”

“Don’t worry. I haven’t forgotten about you,” Spy said with a smile in his voice. “Shall I do it for you too?”

Heavy must have nodded, because there were the sounds of feet shuffling from inside the shower. Seizing his chance, Medic ran towards the half-closed door that separated him from the communal shower. He wasn’t bothering to mute his footfalls anymore. The heels of his jackboots were clicking on the tiled floor.

”Oh, this feels good.” Heavy sighed happily.

“Doesn’t it?” Spy said.

Medic flung open the door to the communal shower.

“I’ve caught you, my thieving friends!” Medic crowed.

His two teammates stood mutely before him. To their credit, neither of them had jumped, but they’d been too surprised to hide Medic’s bottle of shampoo, which lay on its side, with creamy liquid dribbling out of its open lid.

As Medic had thought, his teammates had been, indeed, shampooing their hair. Or, in Heavy’s case, lack of hair.

Spy was squaring his shoulders to look as dignified as a man wearing nothing except for shampoo in his hair could look. Heavy blinked through the soapy water trickling down from the massive heap of bubbles on his bald head.

Spy pushed his hair back from the sharp V in his hairline. “So you have, doctor. And what will you do about it?”

“I should have known you’re behind this,” Medic said, ignoring the question that he had no answer to. His plan hadn’t gone far beyond catching his thief. The Administration department had made it very clear that they didn’t have the time or resources to resolve minor squabbling between the mercenaries, after Soldier had submitted multiple complaints about Pyro stalking him through the base with an axe. “Though I can’t guess why you want to steal my shampoo.”

Spy put a soggy cigarette to his own lips. “You know perfectly why.”

“It is not fair doctor does not share secret,” Heavy said.

“I don’t know what either of you are talking about.” Medic snatched his bottle of shampoo from the floor of the shower. “I’m taking this back.”

“No, doctor,” Heavy said. “Don’t.”

“I’ll lock it away in my underwear drawer,” Medic said. A wide grin crossed his mouth when he saw Spy’s face pale. “And no one will ever steal my shampoo again! Ha ha ha!”

  


* * *

  


The door closed itself behind Medic, but Heavy could still hear Medic laughing outside the locker room in the gym.

Heavy briefly considered chasing after Medic and wrestling the bottle of shampoo away from him, but dismissed the idea as soon as it popped up in his head. For one thing, Medic was a quick man; he could give little Scout a run for his money when not carrying a medi-gun. For another, amongst the rules posted on the kitchen bulletin board, one of them (circled and underlined repeatedly with a black marker pen) expressly prohibited tackling a clothed teammate to the floor while naked and in the shower. Offenders were punishable with a month of latrine duty, and Heavy had no interest in spending his free time scrubbing toilet bowls on his bad knees.

Spy sighed, and Heavy knew he had run a similar scenario in his mind and dismissed it too.

“It appears your concerns about Medic were not unfounded after all.” Spy walked over to the showerhead that was still running, and rinsed the shampoo out of his hair. Once he was done, he moved aside and beckoned Heavy to go under the showerhead.

“You can get to his underwear drawer, yes?” Heavy said. “Cannot be too difficult for you.”

“He keeps his bird feeder on top of his underwear drawer after Scout’s prank. You know how vicious his birds are. His drawer is more heavily guarded than the intelligence room.” Spy pulled a drag on his soggy cigarette, and stopped when he realised it wasn’t lit. He let his hand drop and his cigarette hang limply from his mouth. “No, _mon chéri_ , I’m afraid we’ve seen the last of Medic’s secret remedy for receding hairline.”

Heavy nodded. He couldn’t say it wasn’t a blow, he had been expecting the answer since Medic had bust into the shower and nearly given him a heart attack. “What we do now?”

Spy didn’t answer for a long time, rinsing soap suds from his own shoulders. He was chewing on his soggy cigarette. Heavy wasn’t only good with books and guns and killing little baby men, he was also good at reading people. His sisters had thought him smart and his mother had called him a sensitive boy, but people were a lot like books; it wasn’t hard to read them when one learnt to read between the lines. But Spy… Heavy wasn’t so good at reading Spy. He didn’t think anyone was good at reading Spy.

“What do you think of Sniper?” Spy said.

Heavy frowned at the odd question. He was sure he’d been paying attention in the last two minutes and he didn’t see how Sniper had become the subject of their conversation. “I do not think of him at all.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Spy said. “He is a filthy bushman that smokes and drinks and spends so much time under the sun that his hair should have been burnt off his scalp a long time ago. But he has good hair for a man with his harsh lifestyle, doesn’t he?”

“You think he uses special shampoo?” Heavy said, turning Spy’s new plot over in his head carefully. “Maybe worth a shot. He is Australian. Australians are famous for much hair.”

“Fantastic. His van is even less secured than Medic’s room. I can pick the lock on his van while you distract him, like how we did it with Medic.” Spy smiled around his cigarette. “It’ll be like taking candies from a baby.”

“Baby candies from baby man,” Heavy said.

Spy snorted. He stifled himself behind his hand, but his snorts grew louder as his shoulders shook violently from laughter that kept bubbling up from inside him. When it grew too much for him to hold, the dam broke. Spy threw back his head, and howled with laughter. “Yes, like taking baby candies from a baby man!”

It was a beautiful sound; as sweet as the revving of a well-oiled gun. One day, Spy would be old and balding and wearing toupées because he was used to having hair for most of his life, but he would still have his laugh, and Heavy would continue to love all of him. Heavy would tell him this again now, if he hadn’t already done so in English and Russian and French whenever Spy had been fretting about his hair in front of his wardrobe mirror.

So, his heart swelling for this skinny man that had somehow wormed a way into his cold Siberian existence, Heavy leaned down and kissed Spy on the lips. Spy cut off his own laughter in favour of deepening the kiss. When he slipped an arm around Heavy’s back and pressed his lean body against Heavy’s soft belly, Heavy was reminded that they were both very naked and very wet. Heavy broke off the kiss breathlessly and said, “Should not laugh so loud at plan. Team will hear and look and find out our plan.”

“Then perhaps we should move this discussion to someplace else.” Spy wrapped a hand around Heavy’s slippery elbow and put wickedness into his eyes. “Somewhere more private, no?”


End file.
